PDO doesn't stand for anything, but this week @Thats_Offside suggested "Percentage-Driven Output". One place hockey lags behind other sports for advanced metrics is the hockey community's insistence on naming stats and rankings after creators, leading people to ask questions like "what does PDO stand for?" and "what does CORSI stand for?"

Our PDO leaders from last week, Tampa Bay at 1.095, San Jose at 106.8 and Montreal at 106.8 as well, have all predictably regressed closer to 1. Montreal had a bad defeat against Ottawa on Wednesday, but also big wins against the Senators and Buffalo over the weekend. The Lightning are still shooting at 14%, but Anders Lindback is falling back to earth as the Bolts lost six points on their team save percentage—those wild swings won't happen later in the season.

Somebody should have told the Calgary Flames how to regress. They fell from a .968 PDO last week to the bottom of the league at .940 this week. Much of that, I presume, is from their game against Chicago on Saturday night where they outplayed the Blackhawks for an even 65 minutes, out-shooting them 38-19 at even strength, yet somehow losing 3-2 in a shootout.

Edmonton are interesting. Some Oilers commentators have done the unexpected and have commented they look like a playoff club. I'm referring to the several prominent members of the Oilogosphere, who in my five or six years of reading hockey blogs have never been optimistic about one of their teams. They could start getting some clear victories when their shooting percentage bounces up from below 6%—yikes.

The Washington Capitals aren't dead just yet. They're getting unlucky, with an awful team save percentage and below average shooting. They're still a poor puck-possession club, at least from the early numbers we're seeing, but they'll have competition for the No. 1 lottery spot just yet. The Florida Panthers are in the same position, although they're a worse team. Philadelphia, who are hovering with Washington and Calgary at the bottom of the league standings, are in a bit of a pickle because they can't chalk their struggles to poor luck at even strength.

Next week I'll be posting team puck-possession numbers. They're starting to even out already and once we have about 10 games of data they start to tell their own stories. You can find them here, but I still wouldn't read too much into them right now.

Cam Charron is a BC hockey fan that writes about hockey on many different websites including this one.

Poor Flames. Looking at BtN, they actually appear to be a top 5-10 outshooting team at ES and on the PP. Small sample sizes aside, what we've seen of this iteration of the team would be fully deserving of a deep playoff run.